The global population is ageing, rapidly. By 2050, there will be more people over the age of 60 than children under the age of 15. With healthcare costs soaring, this will only further put a strain on an already stretched health sector. Countries are searching for ways to treat patients with the objective of keeping them away from hospitals. According to a recent article in Politico, a political journal, The Netherlands want to move more and more patients from the waiting room to the living room, and actually use health data to monitor patients for different conditions remotely.

Can medtech – particularly disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic testing – help address this problem?

For the longest time, healthcare was focused on the individual. A patient’s diagnosis was left to a doctor’s skills, experience and intuition. Today, physicians have access to large volumes of shared patient data from across geographies, and are able to extrapolate what will happen to an individual. Major breakthroughs in diagnostic testing and technological advancements in Big Data analysis and artificial intelligence have paved the way for improved diagnostics and pre-emptive care.

The advances in genomics and genetic testing will have a huge impact on public health. Like AI, it will facilitate personalised medicine, and shift the focus of healthcare from treatment and cure, to prediction and prevention. Predictive diagnostics involves identifying mutations in genes that could cause diseases before they actually manifest in a person. So, will genetic testing disrupt the traditional clinical diagnostics industry?

For years diagnosis was an area that was left to a doctor’s skills, experience and intuition, and was almost always after the fact. However, major breakthroughs in diagnostic testing and technological advancements in Big Data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) have paved the way for improved diagnostics and pre-emptive care. Today, physicians have access to large volumes of shared patient data from across geographies. To read and analyse all this requires a lot of effort… That is where AI comes in.

Rapid advances in genomics have made gene sequencing available for commercial applications in healthcare and diagnostics. Genetic testing is being used for diagnosing diseases, identifying genes that could be passed on to children, and screening new born babies for treatable conditions. Potentially, the advances in genomics and genetic testing will facilitate personalised medicine. Essentially, the focus of healthcare will shift from treatment and cure to prediction and prevention.